Vaucasy

Vaucasy

n.
the fear that you’re little more than a product of your circumstances, that for all the thought you put into shaping your beliefs and behaviors and relationships, you’re essentially a dog being trained by whatever stimuli you happen to encounter—reflexively drawn to whoever gives you reliable hits of pleasure, skeptical of ideas that make you feel powerless.

From Jacques de Vaucanson, a French engineer who built a series of lifelike programmable machines (automata), including his masterpiece the Digesting Duck, which could flap its wings and quack, drink water, and digest bits of grain into simulated excrement. Pronounced “vaw-kuh- see.”

The Meantime

Trueholding

Proluctance

Emodox

Indosentia

Apolytus

The Wends

Elsing

Liberosis

Manusia

Wellium

Fitching

Povism

Insoucism

Punt Kick

1202

Desanté

Leidenfreude

Ecstatic Shock

Archimony

a person looking at broken furniture

Indosentia

The Kinder Surprise

Karanoia

a neat stack of white paper

Fata Organa

Fool’s Guilt

Mimeomia

a person wearing an animal onesie garment

Scabulous